What's the deal with artillery? (long)

[Mr. Lucky]

First of all, first post. Tried search, didn't find exactly what I was looking for, I apologize if I'm beating a dead horse. Also apologize if this the wrong forum. Introduced to Civ with SMAC, loved it, SMAC2 anyone? Also loved CivIII.

I know that this is not a realistic game in the way that a sim or wargame is a realistic game. However if one more person posts "I choose gameplay over realism" as if that was an argument ender, or even made sense, I'm going to explode. False choice, false choice, false choice.

This is a game in which a certain amount of realism is the foundation of the gameplay. Go beneath (or too far from) that minimum amount of realism and the gameplay falls apart.

Examples: The Roman emperor is Julius Caesar, not Qin Rosenbaum. Archers fire arrows from bows not bullets from slings. Horse units travel over most terrain at a faster pace then foot units. Battleships can only traverse water tiles. Bombers can affect enemy units without danger, except from certain AA units/interceptors.

Artillery fire, much like air/sea bombardment is indirect fire, not direct. Oh, wait, that last one isn’t true at all.

The above examples are not the way they are for gameplay, but because that’s the world works—and a game, a good game, was built around those facts. Certainly it’s abstracted and not simulated down to a very high level of detail, but things work the way the basically do in real life, except for artillery/siege units, which have Nothing to do with the unit they are named after. This completely breaks the sense of actually doing things in a real-type world. We might as well make Knights move two squares forward and one square diagonally and call it CivChess.

Again, I love abstractions and abstract games, but the artillery/siege units are not abstracted; they’re broken. No explanation (they represent ammunition, etc.) can bring them back to same level of realism/abstraction that the rest of the game sits at.

Now I understand that there were exploits in the old artillery model, but as I understand it the AI didn’t use them. Why should my SP experience be broken because some MP jackasses can’t keep themselves from exploiting a game engine weakness? Why can’t another solution be found? Same unit type limit in a single tile? Total unit limit in a single tile? Anything else then completely eliminating the unique nature and flavor of indirect fire units on the battlefield.

Flame on…

Disgruntled,
Mr. Lucky

[LDiCesare]

There was a nice solution to artillery, it's called stacked combat. CtP2-style. They didn't use it for cIV but the game is still playable. Just consider that an artillery unit represents a wmall regiment of infantry backed with artillery, and that's over.

[Son of David]

Re: What's the deal with artillery? (long)

Originally posted by Mr. Lucky
We might as well make Knights move two squares forward and one square diagonally and call it CivChess.

Firaxis would probably sooner implement something like this than stacked combat.

This is "Sid Meier's" Civilization remember. We don't want to admit that our competitors had a few good ideas now do we - all this goodness is brought down upon us by the gaming god Himself.

[Mr. Lucky]

Can someone explain CtP style stacked combat, and why it couldn't/won't be used in CIV? I jumped into the series with SMAC, never played CtP.

Infantry regiment backed with artillery is the most acceptable abstraction yet, but still pretty woeful.

Mr. Lucky

[RGBVideo]

You can link up to 12 units into a stack (think army in civ3) of units. When a stack attacks, artillery and ranged units stay behind the melee units if the stack has any melee units.

[Blake]

The "realism" rational behind the way you lose arterilly is like this.

Have you ever played an RTS game? What tends to be a high priority for your enemy to destroy?
Artillery.

Atleast in RTS games artillery is very damaging, and relatively easy to destroy. Destroying the artillery makes it easier to hole up.

I'm not sure if IRL it was made a priority to destroy artillery, by flanking, counter-artillery, sabotage or whatever.

But it's what I like to think anyway, that the one-on-one combat is actually an abstraction of simultaneous stacked combat, and that I lost the artillery during the fighting rather than at the start of the fight. That's what floats my boat.

This "abstraction" is also how I understand units losing attack power when damaged. Say you have 4 musketmen vs 1 Riflemen. The musketmen do not actually attack in series, that would give the Riflemen a good chance of gunning them all down. Instead all 4 groups attack at once, which gives them a much better chance of success, better represented by how Civ4 combat works, than if units didn't lose attack power when damaged.

I'd honestly prefer true stacked combat ala CTP2, except with larger possible stacks, but I do generally prefer Civ4 way to Civ3's, both from gameplay and realism.